Christmas. It was almost everything ready for the Christmas in the Sanatorium San Francisco de Paula, De Campos of the Jordo. The local one was ample, with three floors, all white and with many glass windows. The gardens were enormous and well well-taken care of. All great age to our eyes of children; everything had oceanic dimensions.
Some nuns still ran for all the sides, in alucinante go-and-come, to the last preparativeses for the party. Different the other days of the year, when in the environment an absolute silence reigned, day 24 of December remembered plus a municipal market, in one burburinho frantic for the final steps for the Christmas. It was the end of the decade of fifty and Brazil suffered with a tuberculosis epidemic. The sanatorium received hundreds of boys acometidos for the illness, come of all the places of the country and many, as I, come of the city of So Paulo. In house, the first illness vitimou my father and later me. It, a Portuguese of New Village of Gaia, fort, high, voluntary for So Paulo in the Revolution of 32 and with a disposal enviable for the work if it saw impotent ahead of the disease. It also interned itself in a sanatorium for adults, Is Cristovo, in the same city, and there he was per almost two years until the reestablishment. Although the two sanatoriums to be in the same city and of a small distance that one of the other separated to them, my father alone visited me its illness after to be subjected.
The visit occurred in that one 24 of December. It did not lose the love to the family; but it was moved away, resigned, to prevent the minimum possibility of a new I infect, in an incredible effort of the reason being successful the heart. For us, the children of the sanatorium, the high point of the Native one was the delivery of the gifts.